You have a Steam account, but your library is severely lacking. You’re broke and there probably won’t be another massive sale for months. Those in desperate need of new games don’t need to start pan-handling, turning to piracy or internet begging for games. You just need to start looking for free Steam games in the right places.

There are more opportunities than people realize when it comes to bolstering game libraries. If you’re willing to be kind, respectful and perhaps even share the wealth later on down the road when you can afford it, then you might just find something free to play. Of course, searching for these opportunities on your own can be time consuming, so here’s a list of all the places you can find free Steam games.

SteamGifts

The first and best site I’d recommend for grabbing free Steam games is SteamGifts.com. It’s a resource that allows Steam gamers to share their games other other people for free. If you have an extra key or game sitting in your inventory, you can create a giveaway to offer it up on the site. You just set how long you want the giveaway to run and at the end, the site will randomly choose a winner. There are both public and private giveaways available, as well as ones that can only be entered if you’ve given away games on the site.

I’ll level with you. Unless there’s a developer giveaway in progress, like when Evolutionary Games gave away 25,000 copies of Galactic Arms Race, your odds of winning a giveaway at SteamGifts is pretty low. You can improve that by entering private contests or by giving away a lot of games yourself, but odds are you’ll still face a lot of competition.

Still, SteamGifts is a good place to try and win free games. Just don’t get discouraged if you’re attempting to win a game there and lose. Also, try checking it during Humble Bundles, as people often give away the Steam keys for the games they already have there.

Reddit

When it comes a more reliable resource for free Steam games, Reddit is probably a better alternative. There are multiple subreddits dedicated to free game dispersal and all you have to do is bookmark and regularly visit if you hope to find someone willing to share.

If you have a game and want to exchange it, then there’s the Steam Game Swap subreddit. Random Acts of Gaming is devoted to free game giveaways, though you should probably check each giveaway’s title to make sure it’s a Steam game. There’s also Gift of Games. All three could help bolster your game library.

Just remember to be respectful when participating in one of the Reddit giveaways or trades. Thank the person who’s taking the time to offer you freebies!

Steam

Ha! I bet you knew this was coming. A great way to get free Steam games is to just go to Steam itself. The site has a rather robust Free to Play section with 129 available single and multiplayer games as of March 11, 2013. Surprisingly, these aren’t all massive multiplayer online RPGs. Granted, most of them are, but games like Super Crate Box, Dwarfs!? and Microsoft Flight are also available in the library.

If you have any suggestions for also finding (legal) free Steam games, be sure to let us know in the comments! Perhaps if you know any developers or publishers who get generous on Twitter, leave links to their feeds.

Hey! What about TF2 hat trading? You can exchange hats for games in other peoples’ inventories. You can get these hats for free by building up from scrap.

http://www.tremorgames.com/?ref=23582 Ncdilzor

Hi there! Nice tips!

I would like to suggest TremorGames (http://www.tremorgames.com/?ref=23582), where you earn coins for playing flash games and/or completing offers, watching videos and doing tasks and afterwards you can buy a Steam game from the site’s store with the coins. After you buy the game, they send you a keycode of the game you bought. You activate it on Steam and there you go!

I’ve got $118 worth of Steam games from this site just for you guys to know that those free games are real

deepak

you can find giveaways on this site too….
http://go.playblink.com/dmail

pcpietjeisl

There is also this site: http://www.tremorgames.com/?ref=97520 on that site you can play games or do free offers to get coins! with those coins you can buy almost buy everything on steam! from TF2 items to games like Bioshock infinite! I got 168$ worth steam games from the site!

Give it a try guys

Rango

Theres a chrome extension that does steamgifts for you, author says their working on getting contests from forums – thats where all the best giveaways are but it takes forever doing puzzles!

Public giveaways you have no chance

Tim

Tremorgames gives alot of free games just for doing some survey’s
I highly recommend it as I’ve gained almost 900$ worth of games in a month:D
They buy the games for extremely cheap making it extremely worthwhile.

http://www.tremorgames.com/?ref=204038

Lord Letto

Just a FYI, you need to already have $100 worth of stuff in your Steam account in order to use http://www.steamgifts.com/ I have no steam games yet so my value is $0 and can’t enter any giveaways.

http://www.steamgameswap.com Dimios

You have omited to mention our service. You can get free steam games at http://www.steamgameswap.com

Disclaimer: I am the web admin on sGs

http://swagbucks.com/refer/CapitaLeny Leonardo Perez

Swag Bucks is really Cool alot like Tremor Games http://www.tremorgames.com/?ref=38838 But instead of turning your points for games you can buy gift cards and even have your points sent to you as cash to your paypal so that you can buy games.

http://swagbucks.com/refer/CapitaLenye treamor Games

http://idk Gray

I tried to register but it never lets me register no matter what.

http://www.youtube.com/pewdiepie Felix Kjellberg (NOT FULL NAME)

Umm I don’t seem to see the reason you guys are still here xD

http://goldcoingaming.com ChR0n1k

GoldCoinGaming.com is also similar to the sites mentioned in comments! Check it out i’ve earned a few games there with minimal effort